Of Interest

Today, a Record article was released on the administrative response to food insecurity on campus, where students purposefully choose plans with fewer meals in order to save money. The coverage is excellent! Part 1 of a 3 day discussion.

For purposes of comparing the upcoming plans with this year’s plan: Williams offers four options for meal plans that students living on campus must enroll in: 21 meals a week ($6,760 per year or assuming 24 weeks in a year, $13.41/meal), 14 a week ($6,341 or $18.79/meal), 10 a week ($5,164 or $21.51/meal) or, for seniors, 5 a week ($2,728 or $22.73/meal). Note that a sandwich, a bag of chips, and a drink from, say, Spring Street Market, is approx. $12 – lower than any one meal offered by Williams. Wow!

Key quote from Steve Klass, VP of Campus Life on “the critical goal of ensuring that no student goes hungry”:

It’s important to appreciate the centrality of this principle to our decision-making, because we recognized immediately that this meant constraining some set of choices available to students on dining plans.

Emphasis mine. Note that, according to the Record, Sophia Schmidt ’17 first brought up this issue in the fall of 2015. I don’t know what Steve Klass means by “recognized immediately”, but I suppose his definition of “immediately” is at least a year after the fact. Assume that Steve Klass is being honest and really recognized this problem “immediately.” Then why did it take the administration so long to do anything about it? (Why the competent students, who did the research for the admin to “recognize immediately” this problem, were not included in the decision-making process is the subject of another day’s discussion.)

This is concerning, because I don’t believe that Sophia Schmidt ’17 needed that survey to prove that food insecurity is a problem. Much like how swipes in and out of buildings are monitored by campus security, the meal swipes of students are monitored and recorded as well. How would Dining Services know if you used up all your meals at the end of the week, right? Implication: the College has always had the data it would have needed to “recognize immediately” that food insecurity is a problem on campus.

So why didn’t the administration simply look at the data they already have? They could have saved Schmidt and other students the two years they spent working on this issue if they simply looked at the data they already have. Why didn’t they, if “ensuring that no student goes hungry” is a “critical goal” of the administration? Something does not smell right (and I’m not talking about Taco Tuesdays in Paresky).

But maybe I am wrong and the College does not keep data on food swipes/whether or not its students eat. Unsolicited suggestion: it should! How else will they know if their students are eating? Isn’t “ensuring that no student goes hungry” a “critical goal” of the administration? That nothing has been done until now implies either (1) that Klass/the administration on “recognizing immediately” food insecurity is as honest as Kellyanne Conway on the Bowling Green Massacre, or (2) that whoever is in charge of “the critical goal of ensuring that no student goes hungry” is incompetent to not have recognized this sooner.

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8 Responses to “Food Insecurity at Williams I”

x says:

A couple thoughts that didn’t show up in the article (yet):

Dining services has a total captive market and is subsidized by financial aid. For a student like myself, going on the 21 meal plan is a total non-decision, since the college pays the entire cost of my meal plan, as it does for a great number of other financial aid students. And if you receive no financial aid, there’s a decent chance your family is well-off enough that paying for the 21 meal plan isn’t a big deal, either (if you don’t qualify for financial aid, you’re almost certainly from a very wealthy family). This of course isn’t the case for everyone, but the claim that people are going hungry is quite ludicrous to me. If you’re that poor, the college will be paying for your meals.

Second, this note is just to my fellow Ephs, getting free meals here is not difficult. I was here over the summer which required me using the 50 meal block for my free housing. I was here for ten weeks, so that worked out to a paltry 5 meal swipes a week. I made it work by skipping breakfast (which I do a lot anyways), and when I swiped for lunch, I would make a sandwich and grab fruit/deserts and bring them home and eat that for dinner. And then two days a week I would just walk into the dining hall service area when no one was paying attention and grab the rest of my meals. Really not too tricky, I was only given a hard time once. Not ideal, either, but it was the situation I was in.

1) Are you receiving full financial aid? If that’s the case, then that may not be a problem for you. However, I know of multiple friends who are on financial aid, but purposely select a meal plan with fewer weekly swipes to lower their contribution. For these students, the meal plan as is is already expensive; the decision to remove the 5 and 10 meal swipes in place of a 14 meal plan one is even more ludicrous, since now, they’ll all have to pay more for meals they don’t even want/can get for cheap elsewhere!

2) It isn’t the case that everyone who does NOT qualify for financial aid is almost certainly from a wealthy family. EphBlog has many posts on this, but there is a contingent of middle-class students (how many, I do not know… yet!) who barely make it above the cutoff for financial aid. For these students, every dollar matters as well (if not more) since they do not receive any aid and often pay tuition by taking out more significant loans than you or a student who qualifies for more substantial financial aid.

3) How you get free meals is smart, and I know of friends who do that! However, that students have to find ways of gaming the dining services system implies that, if anything, there is a problem.

4) Join EphBlog as an author! You can do it anonymously, or if you want, you can try it out by doing a guest post through me. Feel free to shoot me an email at concerned.ephs@gmail.com!

In name, financial aid “pays” the full cost of the 21 meal plan, but for anyone on a partial aid package, a lower meal plan results in a lower term bill. If a student spends two years on the 10 and one on the 5, that’s a savings of over $7000. Our financial aid system isn’t perfect and this amount of money can be a real difference for students/families.

This is a nice parable on the paradoxes of administering a progressive liberal arts college (and society).

Students think they should be able to choose their own meal plan, because
some meal plans may be too much or too little (in cost or amount, or both) for any individual.
Their freedom to choose results in some students unhappy (with money or food, or both).
The college responds by further restricting the options.

Change “students” to “the American people”, and “meal plan” to “health plan” and you have a nice parallel to the ACA (not perfect, but not too bad). The college has decided on a “one-size-fits-all” plan, for the greater good. Progressive-minded students should be happy with that, and should not be trying to get money out of the system. The college, just like the government, knows best.

But maybe some progressive-minded students have now discovered they don’t like heavy-handed administrative overreach into their lives (or having plans voted on before they have seen it), in which case, welcome to reality.

Also of note, it was not long ago that many of the houses had their own chefs. In the 70s for example, Wood House and a chef and the students in that house would coordinate with him for meals. He would put out a chalk board and let everyone know “what was for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

You could drink beer or brandy or… whatever… right at the table in the dorm being served by the then “Williams meal plan.”

This was probably one of the left over devices from when the college had to negotiate getting rid of the fraternity system.

Over time however, this deal was lost. Having a chef that operated autonomously dealing only with the students in a small dorm lost for larger and larger community dinning facilities.

Also lost was the deal with drinking. When David went to Williams, the drinking age was 21… but that rule was simply ignored on campus. Now, it is strictly enforced.

The more time that passes, the more the administration takes control away from students and professors at the college. The less freedom students get. The rules at Williams now are similar to what we encountered at prep school (grades 9-12) in the late 70s/ early 80s. Seriously.

There is a portion of the student body that continually demands for more authoritarian intervention and the facilitation of daily life. As anon alludes to above, what is done is “just enough to piss a lot of people off.” Administrative overreach at Williams is real. No doubt about it.

I remember I was so broke when I taught at Williams that I frequently took advantage of a special deal where faculty got to eat for free at the dining hall. The idea is that you would mingle with the students and this would add to their educational experience. Sometimes I would sit with the conservative students and chat. Many times, however, I just took the newspaper in and read while I had breakfast or lunch. If I had known that some students were starving, I would have been happy to smuggle out sandwiches.